“The Mac mini has long been the lovably lost scamp of the the Mac family, produced and sold with as seemingly little fanfare as possible,” Nilay Patel writes for This is my next. “No matter: we’ve seen minis used as everything from high-load-bearing servers to HTPCs to just plain old desktop machines. People love the damn thing — it’s one of the smallest and most power-efficient compact PCs available. The only problem was that the mini has traditionally offered fairly poor performance for the money.”
“Well, thank heavens for processor bumps, because that’s all gone away: the new base Mini features a 2.3GHz dual-core Core i5 and a newly-lowered $599 base price,” Patel writes. “There’s also a $799 model that bumps the processor up to a 2.5GHz Core i5 and adds in a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6630M GPU, and a new server configuration with dual 500GB drives and a 2GHz quad-core Core i7 for $999.”
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Patel also notes, “I’m convinced Apple will start shipping the Magic Trackpad as the default pack-in with the iMac sometime soon, and if you’re buying a mini you might want to splurge on one to try out Lion’s new features.”
Patel writes, “It’s a tiny desktop PC that can go anywhere and hook up to nearly anything, and if that’s what you’re looking for you’ll leave extremely happy: the mini offers solid performance in a stunning case that’s unmatched in the industry. Just make sure you spring for a Magic Trackpad — and maybe a standalone Blu-ray player while you’re at it.”
Much more in the full review here.
Related article:
Apple updates Mac mini with Intel Core i5 & i7 processors, Thunderbolt I/O, discrete graphics, and more – July 20, 2011